More news on Obama’s search for legislative or regulatory solution to lawful access to digital systems.

For some time now, the US government has been ever more often stating that there will not be a mandatory technical requirements to enable remote state lawful access, but that they expect provider to somehow come up autonomously with solutions that would allow for lawful access when needed by investigating agencies.

But any company that decided to come up with some techncial and organizational processes to do so, even with extremely effective safeguards for both the citizen and the investigating agency, would appear to be, and possibly actually be, less secure than competing services or devices that do not provide such access.

This problem could be solved if the US government provided very solid and reliable incentives to those that do, and do in a proper way, i.e., they comply to a minimum of citizen-accountable extreme safeguards, that guarantee both the user and the agency. The US government could approve some solidly enforceable policies that prescribe much higher personal economic and penal consequences for official of state agencies that are found searching or implanting vulnerabilities ONLY for high-assurance IT service providers that offer socio-technical systems to comply to government request, as certified by an independent international technically-proficient and accountable certification body. Such new policies would instead exclude IT service or device providers that do not.

To get 2 beans with one stone, such international body could also certify IT services and devices that offer meaningfully high-levels of trustworthiness, something that is direly missing today. One such certification body is being promote by the Open Media Cluster (that I lead), with the name of Trustless Computing Certification Initiative.